Gifa

Design Workshops

Updated 29 September 2009

THE GAUTENG INSTITUTE FOR ARCHITECTURE IS DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT BOOKINGS ARE NOW OPEN FOR THE LAST 4 DESIGN MASTERCLASSES FOR 2009 IN THE SERIES RAPID THOUGHT TRANSPORT: ARCHITECTS RE-IMAGINE JOBURG.

The following masterclasses are available for booking now, and each one will get you 4 category 1 CPD points, as well as a major injection of critical and creative design thinking, designing and debate with some of the most creative minds in South African art and architecture. We aim to re-consider, re-imagine and re-image Joburg towards alternative urban and architectural futures. These workshops aim to open both practice and thought to productive experimental thinking that is able to impact some of the current problematics of Joburg.

You will spend a full weekend in the studio and will then produce a piece of work in your own time (with intermediate crits and conversations) which will be presented publically two weeks later. We have been getting audiences of around 50 people to each public presentation, and this series has stirred quite an interest across all design professions in Joburg … Each workshop comprises eight architects, and two students – places go fast, so please get your bookings in promptly!

Cost is R1140-00 per person including VAT for professionals.
Cost to students is free.

Bookings will be taken by return of email: sarah@sarahcalburn.co.za

Weekend 3, 4, Oct:                 Andrew Makin of designworkshop:sa                                                RTT 6:   THE NEW CIVIC : STRATEGY & IMAGINING: Space, Fluidity and Infinity
                                                                     Venue: 235A Jan Smuts Ave, Parktown North: 9 to 5 each day.
Thurs 15 Oct:                          public presentation of work                                                                                                                                Venue: David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Ave, PArktown North

Weekend 3, 4 Oct:                  Pierre Swanepoel of StudioMAS:                                                      RTT 7:   RE-IMAGINING SANDTON
                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Venue: Arts on Main: 9 to 5 each day.
Thurs 15 Oct:                        public presentation of work                                                                                                                               Venue: David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Ave, PArktown North

Weekend 17, 18 Oct:               The Trinity Session: Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter:             RTT 5: RE-IMAGINING OUR SUBURBAN NETWORKS:     UNFOLDING THE TOWNSHIP
Venue: 235A Jan Smuts Ave, Parktown North: 9 to 5 each day.
Thurs 29 Oct:                          public presentation of work                                                                                                                                Venue: David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Ave, PArktown North

Weekend 14, 15 Nov:              Alex Opper - Architect, Furniture Designer, Design Lecturer                      RTT 8: PLAYING BALL: A FRIENDLY BETWEEN TWO PRIVATE PUBLICS
Venue: JAG: 9 to 5 each day.
Thurs 26 Nov                          public presentation of work                                                                                                                                Venue: David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Ave, PArktown North

updated Friday 14 August 2009

You are invited to participate in the 5th session of Rapid Thought Transport Workshop: Architects Re-imagine Joburg: The Burbs – the Walls to be run by Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter of the Trinity Session.
Rapid Thought Transport is facilitated by the Gauteng Institute for Architecture.

The masterclass will run through the weekend on 15, 16 August at 235A Jan Smuts Ave, Parktown North.
Presentation evening will be Thurs 27 Aug.

4 category 1 CPD points are allocated to this workshop.

We will take between 8 and 10 practicing architects, and 2 architectural students. Cost to practicing architects is R1000-00 exc VAT. Cost to students is FREE.

You are invited to join this rich program of critical thinking and design around the contemporary problematics of Joburg. Work produced will be presented publically, and featured in a Taxi DVD and Catalogue to be produced at the end of the year, after 8 workshops have been run. We have been getting audiences of around 50 people to the public presentations, and much interest has been stirred. Debate, innovative thought and experimental work is encouraged. …. Now is the time to use the recession to your advantage …

Please RSVP as soon as possible to sarah@sarahcalburn.co.za as places are limited!

WORKSHOP OUTLINE:
THE BURBS, THE WALLS
The Trinity Session will use the contemporary example of the Vilakazi Street Precinct Upgrade in Orlando West, Soweto (the historic area of the June 76 Uprising, the houses of Nelson Mandela as well as Walter Sisulu and Desmond Tutu, and home of the Hector Pietersen Museum), to examine the situation of suburban Johannesburg streets, which form our most public (and paradoxically, least used, or least endowed) environments. This case study in particular demonstrates the potential for a powerful interface between public art, the urban upgrade, residents of the area and street users. In addition a number of critical inputs such as the Wits Oral History Projects’ work in the precinct and the research done by Eco Africa, the Tourism consultant, introduce a greater understanding of the historical layering in Soweto and the current uses and flows affecting varying types of interaction and exchange. The challenge presented to the artworks programme is a combination of community participation, integration with the physical upgrade through lighting, urban furniture and surface treatments while symbolically representing the overarching historical narrative, if you will, that envelopes the upgrade.

The continuous network of routes that links our private domains is notably lacking in any form of amenity for its many pedestrian users, and the private boundary wall could be seen to erect the ultimate barrier to public interaction, or exchange between citizens, and the inhabitants of the city. This situation could be read forward to hold some forbidding philosophical ramifications…. This studio proposes that every boundary wall, or every public artwork, should be legislated to provide at least 3 public functions. Could we look at our car- and wall-dominated (increasingly anonymous) streets as a continuous urban park network? How would an initiative of this kind challenge the prevailing cultural notions of paranoia and lock-down against the ‘public’?

updated Tuesday 3 August 2009

YOU ARE INVITED TO: FEEDBACK RTT4

The presentation of works from the fourth design masterclass – Enrico Daffonchio’s Re-imagining Rosebank - in the series devised by Sarah Calburn and the Gauteng Institute for Architects as Rapid Thought Transport - Architects re-imagine Johannesburg .

The presentation will be held at DAVID KRUT PROJECTS, Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood (opposite Goodman Gallery) at 6pm on THURSDAY 6 AUGUST, and we would ask that you are there by 6pm as this will be an continuous electronic stream presentation. Comment and debate is actively sought

Entry: Free of Charge

RTT4: Re-Imagining Rosebank

You are invited to participate in the 4th Rapid Thought Transport Workshop: Re- Imagining Rosebank to be run by Enrico Daffonchio, architect.

The masterclass will run through the weekend on 25th and 26th July 2009 at Arts on Main.

4 category 1 CPD points are allocated to this workshop.

We will take between 8 and 10 practicing architects, and 2 architectural students. Cost to practicing architects is R1000-00 exc VAT.

You are invited to join this rich program of critical thinking and design around the contemporary problematics of Joburg. Work produced will be presented publicly, and featured in a Taxi DVD and Catalogue to be produced at the end of the year, after 8 workshops have been run. We have been getting audiences of around 50 people to the public presentations, and much interest has been stirred. Debate, innovative thought and experimental work is encouraged. …. Now is the time to use the recession to your advantage …

Please RSVP as soon as possible to Sarah Calburn as places are limited!

PROGRAM

LOCATION: ARTS ON MAIN

SATURDAY 25 July 2009

BRIEFING:                                            09:00 – 10:00
WORKSHOP:                                        10:00 – 12:30
LUNCH:                                                12:30 – 13:00
ARTS ON MAIN

WORKSHOP                                         14:00 – 16:00

SUNDAY 26 July 2009

WORKSHOP                                         10:00 – 17:00
LUNCH                                                 12:30

PRESENTATION
Thursday 6 August 2009 at David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood

TOWARDS CONSCIOUS SPACE – ROSEBANK AFTER THE FALL

This project will tackle the opportunities offered to Rosebank by the advent of the BRT and Gautrain – which we must regard as the most ‘public’ platforms that have been laid down in Joburg, possibly in the last 100 years. These twin developments thus hold critical potential by way of a counteraction to the rapidly privatizing ‘public’ domains of the city, and they merge, crucially, at Rosebank. Rosebank currently shows all the signs of maintaining and amplifying its current fortification – notably, it appears to be entrenching its limiting strategy of ‘quasi-public’ space which is defined, essentially, by Mall type development, and constrained urban access points. The planned demolition of Old Mutual Square is a case in point, as public, historic space is transformed into franchised and controlled space – a huge Edgars store, by which the ‘wall’ of Oxford Road is re-fortified.

The design methodology of the studio will focus around the act of design itself: Enrico takes as his point of interest the identification of certain pivotal moments in the creative thought process. It is undoubtedly true that design-thinking requires an active collaboration between both our rational and our irrational thought processes. Could we see Rosebank, currently, as an extremely limited model of rationality, or even as a historic ideal city? In this sense, Enrico will aim towards experimentation in design thinking: he is interested in looking at creative systems used by actors, by lawyers, by mathematicians and chefs, for example. The aim, here, is to arrive at design proposals which do not in any way re-iterate or re-state the givens, which do not regurgitate the stereotypes: we are looking for design outcomes which may surprise you, and us... Design solutions which are seriously able to re-imagine Rosebank, and which in the process make us able to re-imagine ourselves.

RTT3: Use, Misuse and Abuse

now complete

You are invited to participate in the next CPD credited Design Masterclass in the series RAPID THOUGHT TRANSPORT – Architects re-imagine Joburg. This workshop is entitled USE, MISUSE AND ABUSE.

WORKSHOP WEEKEND DATES: 20, 21 June at 235A Jan Smuts Ave, Parktown North , from 9-6 each day
PRESENTATION EVENING: Fri 3 July, at David Krut Projects, Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood

COST: R1140-00 inc VAT per person.
Lunch and drinks included on Sat and Sun.
Bring own drawing materials.

We are taking bookings now, and have limited space – so please get back to me by return of email to book your place.
Full Series outline is attached for those of you who have not received it yet.
The first workshop was run in May, and was extremely successful – so – please jump aboard! Now is the time for an injection of stimulating thinking…..

Students: as you know, we would like at least 2 students in every workshop: so please forward this to anyone you think might be interested (in thesis years, particularly)– if you read the brief below, you’ll see that this is a brilliant opportunity to bring a project you are currently working on in order to severely amplify and explode it….

THIS WORKSHOP WILL BE RUN BY THE ARTIST (AND ARCHITECT) RODNEY PLACE, WITH SARAH CALBURN AND JEAN PIERRE DE LA PORTE:

Rodney Place
Use, Misuse and Abuse
The Listener published a radio broadcast by Claude Levi-Strauss in the late 70’s. In it he criticized the then French Government for announcing a Convention to debate, redefine and, of course, (re)centralize “liberty”, according to Louis XIV and Napoleonic habits. Levi-Strauss thought it was not the business of governments to try to define individual liberty, but rather to create and maintain social representations, collectives, co-operations and orders.
Levi-Strauss preferred the British sense of democracy (and liberty) as organic evolution. Throughout its history Britain had naturally created and continued to sustain particular social and representative institutions – The Monarchy, House of Lords and of Commons, Unions, Metropolitan Councils, National Parliaments, dog owners clubs, etc. It was these on-going representations and particularly the tensions between them that encouraged the idea and practice of individual liberty in Britain. In an organic system, a branch falls off when it serves no useful or attractive purpose. It does not have to be guillotined, just passed by.
Of course things changed rather dramatically in Britain in the next two decades. In the 80’s Thatcher demolished first the Unions then the Metropolitan Councils, as political rivals standing in the way of her centralizing convictions and free market ambitions. She put Britain on a kind of war footing against itself. In the 90’s Blair consolidated Thatcher’s vicTories and created a little Presidency - an echo of big George W’s - free to undertake adventures abroad in the “new national interest”.
We seem to be in a similar social/political/artistic debate in SA about our cities, and architects and architecture are active and instrumental in this debate whether they like it or not.
So in some small way, Use, Misuse and Abuse is designed to challenge conceptions that architecture and architects are destined to construct singular and centralized utopias or theme parks as their political or commercial imperative or professional service.
The idea is that as Johannesburg moves, often reluctantly, from a neat provincial city into a seemingly chaotic metropolis, designing for eccentricity and extreme becomes not only viable, but necessary. The multiple and growing ideas and cultures of urban sociability and liberty here demand it, much as the “New World” demanded that the novel replace the epic, to cope with increasingly differentiated experiences and awarenesses. Authors were severely challenged to stop looking only at the local Mount Parnassus and turn their eyes and minds in many other directions.
Strangely perhaps, such professional changes also suggest going back to basics in terms of the tools and means of visualization. You have to climb down a tree a bit to get to another branch. The all-seeing eye in the early novel was often an insect or animal; otherwise a character might object to the Author being present and seeing her or him in knickers or on the john.
The displaced tools and processes of architectural design are much as Ruskin predicted the consequence of the Industrial Revolution – that it would divide humans into morbid thinkers and miserable workers.
Whether workers are human beings, or machines and programs designed to take over the job - as it was last defined – “creative” thinkers bemoan their underused imaginations and helplessness as worker-machines assume the definition of professionalism. So architects show up for work that seems to happen on its own. In defeat they are forced to become academics, or take up weekend golf where strategy and action seem much closer together.
Participants in this workshop are asked to bring drawings or photos of a current project or one recently completed. Then they are asked to treat these, at first, as pieces of paper with notations and lines – relics and hieroglyphics of the past with ambiguous, even uninteresting meanings that demand reinterpretation. Unlike the Cubists - the head boys of Classical deConstruction of Space - these might, at first, best be treated as Dadaist “poetic” surfaces where a grocery list scrawled across a living room perspective, creates a desire to construct a house out of cornflakes boxes.
The object here is to try to bring architects surprisingly closer to their form. Writers often say an invented character comes alive when he or she seems suddenly to defy the writer’s words. From then on, the writer is compelled to follow. Flaubert was a clever fellow, but Madame Bovary was far more interesting and kept him on his toes.
Let’s try this?
As much as I like good theory and critical texts, I’m unable to honestly offer the past as a recipe for the future. Instead I have asked two artists to guide us through Johannesburg realities they like, know well and have worked with. I’d prefer if these encounters were treated as agitations rather than instructions, because I refuse to treat the source of other artists’ work like Jesus treated a few fish, as an opportunity for a Christian franchise.

Dorothee Kreuzfeld (Artist) – Eritrean quarter – Johannesburg
Premilla Murcott (Film maker) – Train surfing - Johannesburg

FEEDBACK

The C&CI Architecture Master Class 2009.

Theme: Back to the Origins

Residence: Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng

26 April-2 May2009

“Consider the pieces, but before- consider the connections”

R. Leplastrier

“Design the most benefit for the least resource, whilst being the least precious about your Time…. In Africa, architecture is about links and relationships between the individual and the collective, and Form flows from Performance and its resultant Meaning”

Andrew Makin

“Consider the Power of the Unfinished”

Peter Stutchbury

The 2009 Master Class was the first CPD accredited event of this magnitude and stature successfully presented in South Africa and was tailor made towards practicing architects. The Programme was initiated and sponsored by the Cement and Concrete Institute, and was offered in association with Foundation Australia and the Gauteng Institute for Architecture. A welcome bonus was the fact that SAIA gave it the maximum CPD Category One accreditation of 10, 0 points- another South African first!

The idea behind the Class took precedence from the well-known Glenn Murcutt International Design Master Class, which is now an established and world-renowned annual event in Australia and New Zealand. Feedback from local architects indicated that there is a strong need for mid career practitioners to engage in a stimulating design refresher course in South Africa. The cue was to allow a similar design oriented residence-based workshop, where the focus was on a local site with its own peculiar issues of sustainability and context; and to engage in a sensitive process of questioning and conclusion, without being too end product focused.

Richard Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury are both renowned academics and practicing architects in their own country, and are the recipients of numerous prestigious international awards. They have been involved in the setting up and have been engaged in the Australian Glenn Murcutt Master Class for several years with much experience in tutoring. They were co opted with international award wining South African Andrew Makin (of Constitutional Court fame) as tutors for the workshop. They certainly did perform their task well by taking their class of 23 participants onto a roller coaster change of perceptions and through an intensive weeklong design process of questioning and investigation!

The chosen site, situated in the Cradle of Humankind, had to be Drimolen which is an important site for panteological and hominid fossil excavations. To date 75 specimens of Paranthropus (Australopithecus) robustus and 5 Homo sapiens and thousands of animal fossils have been unearthed. Conducting a design investigation on such a sensitive site not only proved to allow questioning of the different aspects of the phemenology of context: It certainly also proved to stay true to the central theme of the workshop namely ‘Back to the Origins’! The leading panteologist- Dr Kaiser gave a lecture on site that taught his attentive audience that rocks from the moon is dated at 4 billion years, and that rock from Swartkops in the area is dated at 3, 5 billion years. This is the oldest geological found yet in the world. Some fossils at Drimolen came dated at 2,6million years with the Homo erectus fossils unearthed at the neighboring Sterkfontein Caves such as Mrs Ples clocking in at1, 5million years. Homo sapiens, or modern man as defined by cognitive thinking & abstract thought, arrived very late and only about 200 000 years ago. Moreover, according to latest theories this modern man originated in Africa, and from here migrated then to Europe and Asia about 50 000 years ago.

Under the sagely guidance of the Tutors, the students- working in groups of three delved into a deep process of design investigation. This focused mostly around the relevant relationships between an architectural response and a unique Landscape. Design questioning abounded around the issues of which constituted the Genus Locii as a- Spirituality; Primordiality, the ecology and climate; geology and panteology, biology and anthropology. Definitions of architectural appropriateness; symbolism and memory, narrative and representation were rephrased and concluded, sometimes under heated debate between group members! Evenings lend themselves to formal lectures by experts such as Prof Peter Rich, presentations of their own work by the tutors, bush dinners and social interactions, which all added to rich and fond memories of the Class.

The C&CI is proud to have been associated with this successful event, and is anticipating continuing this as an annual event on the South African architectural calendar.

“I wanted to express my appreciation for the Master Class arranged by the Cement and Concrete Institute, which I attended. It was a unique and life changing experience for me. One does not often have the opportunity to interact with great local and international practitioners.

The standard of the teaching, the talks, the crit sessions and the design submissions from the groups was extremely high, I thought, and very inspiring. It has given me lasting inspiration and a renewal of vision for my practice in the future.

The event was professionally organized, well structured and carefully coordinated.

I would like to thank the C&CI in particular for involvement in every detail, ensuring that everyone that attended had a meaningful, memorable and enjoyable experience. I certainly hope that the C & CIi will continue to reach out to architects in this manner in the future”

Jon Jacobson. Managing Partner. METROPOLIS Architects

Andrew Makin

Rick Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury

Eduardo Cachucho, Andrew Makin, Rick Leplastrier, Peter Stutchbury

Outline of future RTT workshops

WORKSHOP OUTLINES AND METHODOLOGIES

Please note that all dates from Workshop 3 onwards are subject to change within the month, and the order of Masterclasses may also change, although we will endeavour to avoid this. Please specify which class and/or which date suits you best, and we will keep you informed. Please note that admission to classes will be on a first come first served basis, and all masterclasses will form a body of work.

SARAH CALBURN with Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall / Rodney Place / Jean-Pierre de la Porte

SARAH CALBURN ARCHITECTS

RAPID THOUGHT TRANSPORT 9,10 May > 21 May

M1 HIGHWAY

This project will take the (largely sub-) urban domain of the M1 Highway as it passes through Joburg from Soweto to Midrand. This program has recently been run by Sarah Calburn as an advanced Design Elective for 4th year Architectural students at the University of the Witwatersrand, whose work and ideas will be introduced to the studio towards its conclusion. We will look at the highway as, paradoxically, our most public and our most private space. We will consider issues of peripheral wasteland, outmoded ideas of ‘park’, pedestrian conflict and exclusion, fortification, boundary, the highway as natural home for the homeless, the nature of both fast and slow transit spaces, the highway as energy generator and pollutant as well as the provider of informational space which deals with not only the highway itself, but potentially with the city beyond. All these issues and more will be tackled in an integrated landscape-urban-architectural program which treats the highway as, what is, essentially, a linear urban surface which treats both physical space, mental space and time. Roberto Burle-Marx’s historic plans for the M1 will be discussed, as will theoretical writings by such landscape thinkers as James Corner and Alex Wall as we try to get to grips with not only the history, but the future of the highway as a potentially dynamic conveyor of urban strategy which can both creatively challenge and critique many of the alienating characteristics of contemporary Joburg.

This project was presented at David Krut.

Rodney Place with members of the first workshop. Sarah Calburn introduces the presentation at David Krut

THORSTEN DECKLER, ANNE GRAUPNER AND GUY TRANGOS 9,10 May > end July

26’ 10 SOUTH ARCHITECTS

The Informal City

This master class will define and explore architectural approaches informed by the immediacy and dynamism of the informal city. The class will focus a particular locality – a vibrant living and trading street – in one of Joburg’s largest informal settlements. Extensive research and documentation of the street will be made available to the class in order for participants to engage creatively and constructively in a dominant but largely misunderstood reality of South African cities.

Premise

Despite the UN-Habitat’s call for “cities without slums” pronounced in 1999 the number of informal settlements has drastically increased. Similar ambitions are expressed closer to home: In South Africa housing lists dating back to 1998 clearly demonstrate that formal approaches to housing delivery are not effective enough. The informal city fills the gaps left by what the formal city does not and cannot provide. In this context people house themselves, creating their own opportunities for trade, entertainment and education through informal economic and social networks. The resultant environments, whilst flawed on many levels, display complex and rich spatial arrangements intimately suited to their inhabitants’ needs and far surpassing what the state, aided by “professionals”, has so far managed to deliver.

In order to stimulate a debate around this topic 26’10 south Architects, in partnership with the Goethe-Institute, has initiated research into the architecture and processes of popular urbanism. As a case study a specific street in Diepsloot (a predominantly informal settlement 40km north of Johannesburg’s city centre) has been chosen. This trading and living strip, displays a hyper vibrancy common to many informal settlements. The actual residential / living fabric has been carefully documented in order to render it in the language familiar to the built environment professional and to reveal the hidden processes, economic and spatial decisions which have been made in the design and production of the structures.

Public Debate & Master Class

Debate on the subject of the informal city will be initiated by presenting the above research in a distilled form on the 23rd of April at the Goethe-Institute in Parkwood, Johannesburg. The debate will then be carried forward into the master class offering a chance to learn from, address and project the Diepsloot reality to a logical and surprising conclusion. The anticipated result is a composite vision for a South African living and trading street as well as critically engaging with a dominant reality outside of the constraints of practice.

This Workshop will run at the Goethe Institute Projects Space at Arts on Main over the weekend 9,10 May 2009. (in other words, simultaneously with the Highway Project above.)

RODNEY PLACE 20, 21 June > 3 July

ARTIST (AND FORMER ARCHITECT)

USE, MISUSE, ABUSE

This workshop introduces point of view into the act of design - a challenge to the notion that architecture can only be practiced from the viewpoint of omniscience (as is implicitly suggested by ‘the plan’).

Film directors and novelists are, like architects, ultimately responsible for the overall sense and structure of their forms. However, unlike most architects, they have a way of surrendering to their fictional characters as an act of fruitful and vital imagination in making something. There is a certain act of ‘immersion’ involved.

Participants are asked to bring a recently completed or in-progress project and rethink it (critique it, remake it, deform it) according to these three points of view: use, misuse, abuse. It should be emphasized that this is definitely not a 60’s-like “user survey”, but rather an idea that design can involve the immersion of the designer in a project as an invented and inventive character. Projects will, with luck, span the gamut of urban intervention, and will thus be able to engage many of the flawed and problematic facets of this city.

ENRICO DAFFONCHIO 25, 26 July 2009 > 31 July 2009

DAFFONCHIO AND ASSOCIATES, architects

TOWARDS CONSCIOUS SPACE – ROSEBANK AFTER THE FALL

This project will tackle the opportunities offered to Rosebank by the advent of the BRT and Gautrain – which we must regard as the most ‘public’ platform that has been laid down in Joburg, possibly in the last 100 years. These twin developments thus hold critical potential by way of a counteraction to the rapidly privatizing ‘public’ domains of the city, and they merge, crucially, at Rosebank. Rosebank currently shows all the signs of maintaining and amplifying its current fortification – notably, it appears to be entrenching its limiting strategy of ‘quasi-public’ space which is defined, essentially, by Mall type development, and constrained urban access points. The planned demolition of Old Mutual Square is a case in point, as public, historic space is transformed into franchised and controlled space – a huge Edgars store, by which the ‘wall’ of Oxford Road is re-fortified.

The design methodology of the studio will focus around the act of design itself: Enrico takes as his point of interest the identification of certain pivotal moments in the creative thought process. It is undoubtedly true that design-thinking requires an active collaboration between both our rational and our irrational thought processes. Could we see Rosebank, currently, as an extremely limited model of rationality? In this sense, Enrico will aim towards experimentation in design thinking: he is interested in looking at creative systems used by actors, by lawyers, by mathematicians and chefs, for example. The aim, here, is to arrive at design proposals which do not in any way re-iterate or re-state the givens, which do not regurgitate the stereotypes: we are looking for design outcomes which may surprise you, and us... Design solutions which are seriously able to re-imagine Rosebank, and which in the process are able to re-imagine ourselves.

STEPHEN HOBBS AND MARCUS NEUSTETTER 15,16 Aug > 28 Aug

THE TRINITY SESSION – Public Art Makers and Strategists

THE BURBS, THE WALLS

The Trinity Session will use the contemporary example of the Vilakazi Street Precinct Upgrade in Orlando West, Soweto (the historic area of the June 76 Uprising, the houses of Nelson Mandela as well as Walter Sisulu and Desmond Tutu, and home of the Hector Pietersen Museum), to examine the situation of suburban Johannesburg streets, which form our most public (and paradoxically, least used, or least endowed) environments. This case study in particular demonstrates the potential for a powerful interface between public art, the urban upgrade, residents of the area and street users. In addition a number of critical inputs such as the Wits Oral History Projects’ work in the precinct and the research done by Eco Africa, the Tourism consultant, introduce a greater understanding of the historical layering in Soweto and the current uses and flows affecting varying types of interaction and exchange. The challenge presented to the artworks programme is a combination of community participation, integration with the physical upgrade through lighting, urban furniture and surface treatments while symbolically representing the overarching historical narrative, if you will, that envelopes the upgrade.

The continuous network of routes that links our private domains is notably lacking in any form of amenity for its many pedestrian users, and the private boundary wall could be seen to erect the ultimate barrier to public interaction, or exchange between citizens, and the inhabitants of the city. This situation could be read forward to hold some forbidding philosophical ramifications…. This studio proposes that every boundary wall, or every public artwork, should be legislated to provide at least 3 public functions. Could we look at our car- and wall-dominated (increasingly anonymous) streets as a continuous urban park network? How would an initiative of this kind challenge the prevailing cultural notions of paranoia and lock-down against the ‘public’?

PIERRE SWANEPOEL 12, 13 Sept > 25 Sep

STUDIOMAS ARCHITECTS

RE-IMAGINING SANDTON: EXCLUSIONS

Re-imagining the established suburbs of Johannesburg involves a sustained critique of the way people move, live, interact and trade over a large area. If we can look at the city in this way, we would require more than the status quo, which simply allocates Uses to isolated pieces of land (usually fenced) that are accessible only when assisted by vehicles. We would like to suggest that a critical (and optimistic) approach might rather instigate thinking towards the possibility of creating adaptable (multiply controllable) spaces that both arrange themselves around - and are able to accommodate - both human and car scale. Can we go from the divided now into an integrated future? Sandton is, probably, the ultimate project of car-privileged access and ‘islanding’. The fact is, however, that there is a huge pedestrian and small scale component which is relegated to un-integrated edges and traffic islands. In other words, we would suggest that the same paradigm governs the environment of both the ‘included’ and of the ‘excluded’.

The growth of residential suburbs around Joburg’s original business centre has created a situation where in view of incremental spread and related progressive traffic congestion, the essential character of main access routes has substantially altered. The result is that we have an odd and often uncomfortable evolution from residential to business along once leafy residential streets which are caught in a strange kind of ‘highway corridor becoming’. Increasing demolition of our originally (intimate and/or exclusionary?) suburban fabric appears to result in a computer generated landscape of what could be called baronial office parks (ie with pretensions to grand homes) in which the ‘street’ is left untreated in an odd kind of neutrality, a nothingness, or a ‘given’. The resulting fabric is one totally lacking in definition and character, and what’s more, one which appears to lack any amenities for the ‘man on the street’.

Around these new satellite business centres, ‘buffer zones’ are declared to create -illusively- an idea of mediation between distinct areas. These spaces, in reality, become kind of ‘dead zones’; unregulated and unmaintained. This is the legacy of our historically inflexible town planning regulations: the binary machine of apartheid (reliant upon modernist principles of) zoning. These spaces effectively inhibit integration and they in essence lack robustness : they limit the degree of synergy that can exist between a mix of uses.

This studio aims to move way beyond town planning transportation paranoia and way further beyond the architectural obsession of creating sexy buildings. We are interested in the imaginative possibilities of a robust city form. A robust city which is able to contain not only our pasts, but is able to project our futures.

ANDREW MAKIN AND JANINA MASOJADA 10, 11 Oct > 23 Oct

DESIGN WORKSHOP:SA

We are still waiting for this Studio proposal.

ALEX OPPER 14, 15 Nov > 27 Nov

Architect

STRANGE LINE

This studio will take the strange ‘line’ of the palisade between Joubert Park and the JAG as a site of friction and potential, with the aim of initiating a physical dialogue between the ‘public’ museum as classical archive and the ‘public’ park as living ‘museum’. Participants in this workshop would develop strategies for this edge/link - these should take the form of designs for physical, ephemeral interventions/installations

HENNING RASMUSS

Paragon Architects

We are still waiting for this studio proposal

which re-imagine the (non-)relationships between these two urban bodies, park and museum.